A brief word of thanks to Robert Dyer and Emmanuel Plantade for taking the trouble to spell out in such careful detail their thoughts on the pronunciation of Virgil's hexameters. I won't attempt to comment on either post, for the question is altogether beyond me (and indeed even EP calls himself a neophyte!), but let me say merely that I had some vague awareness of the basic theory described by Robert Dyer, and have long suspected that it comes from or is at least supported among anglophone classical scholars by considerations of traditional English prosody. "The metrical scheme is present in your head but you don't hear it" is how it was once explained to me. If I remember rightly, the remark was meant to apply to both English and Latin verse.
It was news to me that the theory is contested and that there's a Swiss web site which includes the terse assertion "ictus -- n'existe pas". So I'm not alone in thinking that word accent (or "stress accent", as Howatson calls it) is the main thing. But in English verse at least the metre does have some influence on the way poetry is read aloud, and sometimes it's a bad influence. For example, I have often heard Milton's line "Why am I thus bereav'd thy prime decree?" read with a heavy emphasis on the first and fourth words. No! it should be on the first and third. (By the way, when we read Samson Agonistes at school in the early 1950s, I remember the teacher pointing out to the one student of Greek in the form all the lines where Milton was imitating Greek lyric and dramatic metres. Is this right? Why have I never found references to those metres in annotated editions of the poem? But this is wandering rather far from mantovano's focus on Virgil.) Simon Cauchi [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.lpf.org.nz/free/directory/cauchi.htm ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
